I thought I would follow up to last week’s post on The Jim Rome Show.  Writing about radio got me thinking about the new forms of audio media out there today.  The first thing that came to mind is satellite radio.  I have never paid for the service, but I have friends that annoyingly love it.  While satellite radio is great, we all know the MP3 player has been the real game changer in audio media.  I am sure there are thousands of thoughts on the web about MP3 players out there, so I will avoid boring you with mine.

For many companies, webinars (or, if you prefer web seminars) and podcasts have been a great way to get your message out.  At MySQL (now the Database Group at Sun Microsystems), we have been using webinars to inform our users and to generate leads since 2004.  After the Live Webinars take place, we post the recording of the webinar on the website.  The basic idea is to provide useful information that our community wants to hear in a format that is interactive.  All we ask in return is some general information .  Our community gets useful information, we get some information about our community.

After Sun Microsystems bought MySQL I started to look into what Sun is doing as far as podcasts or webinars.  I discovered SunRadio on BlogTalkRadio.  I have only attended a couple of events and they have been good.  It is a great way to get out information and allows interaction.  Sun has recently announced a new show called Socially Speaking, a show focused on social media.  The first show is today at 3pm PST and features Shel Holtz on Digital Communication.  I thought a few people here might be interested.

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How do you tell management the reason a campaign isn’t returning the results they want is because the campaign sucks? You might as well tell them their kid’s ugly.

(I didn’t have a picture of an ugly kid - mine are too cute - so I decided to pick on @brandmilitia’s ugly dog - sorry Justin)

I usually run into this problem in two scenario’s:

1) I’ve inherited someone else’s project that was ill-fated from the beginning.

2) The objectives of the campaign mysteriously change after the campaign is launched

Inheriting someone else’s Frankenstein project.

There’s really not much you can do. The person/s often times didn’t have a clue what they were doing and wanted to use some Web 2.0 “stuff”. They get some bad advice from a vendor that wants to sell them some tactic that they don’t really know how to execute on. And since they’re already an approved vendor list for “interactive” they go with it.

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My first social media experience came over the AM sports talk radio air waves. It was my junior year of high school that I discovered The Jim Rome Show (wikipedia) and I am still listening. Sure radio is old news, old media and loses out to my iPod or even CDs most of the time. Yet the lessons I learned from Jim Rome and my fellow Clones from The Jungle continue to help me in my online marketing job today.

Lesson #1: Ask your customers to “Have a Take”.

I consider The Jim Rome Show social media because of the participation he asks from the Clones (the show’s listeners). The show is an amazing example of co-creation. Rome asks his listeners that call in to “Have a Take”, meaning have an opinion and purpose when you call in. This contribution and the enforcement by Jim is unlike any other AM talk show I have encountered. It showed me that I can ask my customers to contribute. The open source software market in which I work asks it’s customers and users to contribute in many ways that are extremely important to business and software development. Not all customers need to contribute, but why not ask more of those that are willing to do so? People like to participate and be a part of something. Social Media makes this contribution and participation easier for customers to do and easier for companies to facilitate. Find ways to use it and use it to improve your business.

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I’m thrilled to announce that several of the authors featured on the Conversations Matter blog will be speaking at the upcoming BlogWorld 2008. Joining me on September 20 from 11:00am - 12:00noon for what I’m certain will be a fascinating discussion on corporate social media will be Michael Brito of Intel, Tac Anderson from Hewlett-Packard, Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations, and Anne Plese from Cisco.

Ever wonder how successful social media marketing programs really are when executed in the real world? As members of this panel we will discuss our successful and not-so-successful social media marketing and PR programs. Titled Beyond Blogging: Stories & Social Media Lessons Learned in the Real World our fun panel of everyday experts is bound to be both entertaining and enlightening.

Rumor has it there are discounts available for those interested in attending. Tac Anderson has a code listed on his site anyway. So he must know. Be sure to let us know if you plan to attend. We’d love for you to join us for a shot of tequila.

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There’s a new facebook group trying to influence Barack Obama’s choice of Vice President. The story here is that in the old days, there really wasn’t any way for Barack Obama to get real time polling information outside of a few hundred poll calls and there certainly wasn’t an effective way for a community to quickly ban together to influence such a decision.

But now there’s an outside chance 100k people might directly influence his VP pick – in real time. That’s awesome – that’s the power of Web 2.0. Other than physically assembling thousands of people for a riot or march or standing in front of Lucky’s collecting signatures – how else can this number of people collectively have a voice in such a short time frame? This isn’t a petition – it’s a near real time shout. These aren’t just signatures, they’re virtual profiles that carry all the weight of an individual’s identity.

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It’s been nearly a month since the launch of the Cadence user community. Summers are generally slower in terms of traffic for many online communities, as folks tend to take vacations, so I was somewhat concerned about getting the necessary momentum to ensure success.

At the Online Community Unconference in June, one of the tracks was called “Community Year One,” hosted by Joe Cothrel, a pioneer in the online community space. Joe was instrumental in helping me get the discussion forums on the right track for the Symantec Technology Network, which I launched in 2007. The gist of his recent presentation focused on ways of ensuring that your new user community is successful within the first year of launch. Since his advice worked the first time around for me at Symantec, I attended his presentation as a refresher.

Joe started by introducing a couple of key “rules”: the 90-9-1 rule and the 30-10-10 rule. The first is that 90 percent of visitors will browse the forums; 9 percent will participate casually; and 1 percent will account for most content. And, within any 30-day period, 10 percent of people who see an invitation will come, and 10 percent of those will post. Joe calls these “planning assumptions” rather than predictions. You may do better than this, but don’t plan on it.

In other words, community is a numbers game. Get the numbers right, and you’ll be successful. Get them wrong, and you’ll struggle.

Now you might think that this news bodes ill for a company like Cadence, which like many successful business-to-business companies isn’t exactly a household name, and doesn’t have millions of eager customers – just many thousands. So how did we do?

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I use Twitter. I use Twitter a lot. I use Twitter so much that I even wrote my own Twitter Manifesto; which I think is already out of date. Sometimes I use it to chronicle my daily life; sometimes for self promotion and other times to communicate the latest the greatest at Intel.  Regardless of the contents of my “tweets”, I can humbly say that my intention is to be authentic, build trust with those who follow, nurture that relationship and evangelize Intel’s social media initiatives without interrupting the nature of the conversation.

From what I understand, there have been several internal conversations within various organizations about Twitter usage and whether or not there is business value to have employees use Twitter during work hours.  I personally believe there is value; assuming of course that the concept of “community building”, “evangelism” or “social media” fall somewhere within your job description.

My friend and colleague Bob Duffy touched on this subject just the other day:

This is all too real. I was just told last week that some employers are watching tweets and wondering why employees are doing this during work.   I have not heard of policies yet but there’s communication out there to keep it in control or you will be viewed in the wrong light.  The old, manage workers through political pressure trick.

As I read through Bob’s post, I tried to put myself in management’s position and try to understand their point of view about this matter. Now I completely agree that there is a serious problem if an employee is spending their entire day on Twitter and not living up to their performance expectations.  I really don’t think this is the case though.  I think it’s merely a lack of understanding and education, not just about Twitter but holistically about social media. If done right, Twitter can be used to share/learn best practices about social media; get instant feedback about current projects; distribute content and build community.  It really is an awesome tool.

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Every company thinking about being active in social media needs to have some sort of policy around transparency and disclosure. The debates seems to be how heavy handed do you make your policy? Do you leave no room for doubt? Do you take a hands off approach?

Some policy’s range from Microsoft’s “Don’t do anything stupid.” to more complex lawyer written policies.  Some recommend a simple URL link in a blog comment as enough transparency while companies like Dell require employees to add ‘atDell” to the end of their names.

At HP, management refers employees to our existing Standards of Business Conduct with some additional guidelines specific to social media. In those additional guidelines the overarching theme is full disclosure, transparency and respect but it’s largely left open to individual interpretation.

What if your company doesn’t have a stated social media policy? The Blog Council has just released a do-it-yourself Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit.

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Last week a number of separate issues came together around Twitter activity and I just had to wonder why some people are in love with Twitter while others are on the side-lines with folded arms and a scowl.

The divide is pretty strong even among social media advocates.  Check out this post from Steven Hodson.  Who says

I find it insulting that Twitter is even considered to be in the same field as blogs or even micro-blogs.

This is a common response I get on Twitter.   Folks who don’t use it seem to roll their eyes whenever I jump on my iPhone to jot down what I’m doing.

I liken it to people who don’t get social media yet.  Folks who say about social networking and blogging  “I just don’t know where THEY find the time” As they dash away to check their crackberry.

I sense a bit of social media snobbery regarding Twitter.  As if these 140 characters are bits of nonsense, and only fodder for the ubber conversationalist seeking to match their tweet rate with Scoble.

So what is it about Twitter?  On the suface I’d say it’s a bit like open mic night. A soap box game of one-liners to see if you can get some attention and pick up more followers.  But there IS some hidden marketing value that is not well understood

Breaking it down Twitter it is a continual stream of very short posts, out to a friends network. And as a follower you get a river of thought from people you trust and find relevant.  Unlike blog posts, tweets (tweet is to Twitter as post is to blog) are in the moment, real time. They are restricted to 140 characters so they forced to be brief.

This all lends itself to very simple, short and easy to send personal thoughts and updates.  “At Starbucks for the 3rd time today.. do I have problem?”

And when you tweet you are filling in those spare minutes of your day.  And YES, we do all still have plenty of those.  While you wait for your non-fat double half caff-latte order, or wait for a guest presenter figure how to connect his laptop to your projector.  These are Twitter moments, which are the same moments other folks are checking voicemail, checking email, or picking the lint out of their pockets   For most it’s that spare time that typically goes wasted anyway.

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Jeremiah has an interesting list over on his blog. Being a Social Media Analyst he’s compiled a list of all us corporate social media types.

It’s a pretty cool list. But I think there is one drawback to the way his list is compiled. It make’s it sound like you either have Strategists or Tacticians.

When in reality, my experience is, good social media workers fall along some spectrum between strategy and tactics.

Is the Marketing Campaign Dead?

Many people are calling for the death of the campaign. I think that for most social media endeavors that makes sense, but there will always be times where a short timed campaign makes perfect sense.

The problem with campaigns is that they are not flexible. You front load the campaign with all your money, buy your media and then launch it into space. Social media requires you to be able to think on your feet. You have to be flexible, adaptable. All of your assumptions about an initiative can change with one comment or someones positive or negative blog post.

You have to be Tactically Strategic.

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